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| piccadilly jim
PARTNERS
Frances O’Connor as Ann and Sam Rockwell as Jim - a couple
who, says McKay, “are perfectly suited to one another but
can’t quite get it together”.
I would often have discussions with him when we were blocking a scene where he would go, ‘Oh I saw a thing once where Cary Grant did this…’, and he would do the thing and he would do it terribly well, but he would be doing it as Sam playing Jim. So I was always pleased that we were finding a new equivalent of that sort of effortless cool that those guys had.
Sam is like the Elvis Presley of the thirties - the opposite of a stuffed-shirt. In fact, the only time when I thought he was going off the tracks was a scene where he is having an argument with a clerk in a shipping office. He wants to get on the boat and the clerk won’t let him. Sam wanted to smoke a pipe in that scene, because he had seen a scene in It Happened One Night with Clark Gable, where Gable smokes a pipe. We had a very long series of arguments about whether a pipe could or could not be cool in 2004, and I’m very pleased to say that I won the argument and pipes will not be appearing!
… the plot of Piccadilly Jim
The romance of Jim and Ann is the romance of two people who are perfectly suited to each other but just can’t quite get it together. There’s always some very silly thing that is keeping them apart or making them angry with each other. Jim is a supremely cool, fast-talking, badly behaved, very sort of sexually hot guy. And Ann is his equivalent: she punches his weight, she’s a very capable, feisty, spunky take-no-prisoners, liberated kind of woman. In actual fact, she is a hard boiled crime writer and she can give Jim as good as he can. But the thing is that she is the one girl in the world that he can’t have.
Ann has already decided that she hates Piccadilly Jim purely on the basis of his reputation, so Jim has a hard time pursuing her because he can never admit who he is. In fact, he has to pretend to be someone else entirely: he pretends to be a kind of not-drinking, not-gambling, not-smoking, not-doing-anything-naughty kind of guy. and in the end Ann wonders if really she should be attracted to him because he’s so not her kind of guy: if only he was a drinking, smoking, gambling, chasing-women kind of guy!
So it’s at that point that the ultimate complication happens, where she finds out that this not-Jim actually resembles Piccadilly Jim. Then she gets Jim to pretend to be Jim to help her kidnap her nephew Ogden, so Jim has to learn whole new ways of becoming himself.
… the cast of Piccadilly Jim
Directing Piccadilly Jim was a little bit like being a cattle man on a ranch, because Julian Fellowes has adapted a novel that is full of characters. There’s no such thing as a minor character in a PG Wodehouse story: everyone somehow winds up being a main character, because they’re all very funny and they all have their little bit to do.
Scenes would routinely come along in which there would be seven or eight leading characters all talking all the time and none of them doing convenient things like sitting down or leaving the room, which is when a director gets a tea-break! I often felt, ‘I’m loving this because we have so many great actors in the movie. But, at the same time, I wish I had a cattle prod so I could shift them all over into the corner instead of them sitting around and talking and having a laugh with each other…!’
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PICCADILLY JIM
Mission Pictures, Myriad Pictures, Inside Track,
Isle of Man Film Ltd
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Prod: Peter Czernin, Graham Broadbent, Andrew Hauptman; Exec prod: Kirk D’Amico, Marion Pilowsky, Steve Christian; Dir: John McKay; Scr: Julian Fellowes, adapted from the novel by PG Wodehouse; Ph: Andrew Dunn; Prod des: Amanda McArthur; Cost des: Ralph Holes; Ed: David Freeman; Casting: Jill Trevellick; Mus: Adrian Johnson.
With Sam Rockwell (Jim Crocker), Frances O’Connor (Ann Chester), Tom Wilkinson (Bingley Crocker), Brenda Blethyn (Nesta Pet), Hugh Bonneville (Reggie Wisbech), Allison Janney (Eugenia Crocker), Austin Pendleton (Peter Pet), Tom Hollander (Willie Partridge), Geoffrey Palmer, Pam Ferris (Trimble), Rupert Simonian (Ogden).
International distribution: Myriad Pictures/UIP
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